Japan

Description:
Nikkatsu Romano Porno starring Naomi Tani. In this one she plays a bored and sexually frustrated housewife who runs into an old friend whose husband is an artist specializing in paintings of women in bondage. The plot unfolds just as you’d imagine, only with more (simulated) dog on woman sex than usual. This is not a good movie for sensitive souls. However perverse the film is, though, its “message” is essentially conservative, as Tani and her husband gain a new appreciation of one another through candles, crucifixion, and canine play. S/M is a sort of couple’s therapy, and their marriage is saved. Would Dr. Phil approve?Read More »

Kentai wrote:
Based on a porno manga by Kosuke Miki and Tadashi Matsumori, this pair of short features follow the adventures of Yuki, who works in a Kyoto red-light district house of ill repute as a “tamawari,” or “virgin-breaker.” She’s the gal who gets first dibs on the new recruits to the brothel (some willing, some not), and it’s her job to break them in for future clients. The first film finds Yuki involved with a group of political rebels, and in the slower sequel Yuki thinks she’s finally found love after some studly service, but as you might expected, things don’t quite turn out the way she expected.
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An hour-long feature from Japanese director Shinyu Tsukamoto, Tetsuo (also known as Tetsuo: The Iron Man) tells a horrific, cyberpunk-influenced science fiction tale about the intersection of man and post-industrial technology. The central character is a Japanese salary man, an average office worker who is transformed by a brief encounter with a metals fetishist, a man who has purposefully implanted pieces of scrap metal in his body. The salary man soon begins sprouting pieces of metal from various parts of his body, a change which is accompanied by increasingly nightmarish visions and bizarre, metal-filled sexual fantasies. As the man evolves into a strange hybrid of man and machine, he also develops a telepathic connection with another of his kind: the metal fetishist, who has been undergoing a similar conversion, and may indeed be the cause of the salary man’s transformation. The two engage in a violent, destructive battle throughout the streets of Tokyo, accompanied by an appropriately industrial soundtrack. Shot on a small budget in 16 millimeter black-and-white, Tsukamoto reprised many of the images and plot elements of Tetsuo in a higher-budgeted sequel, Tetsuo II: Body Hammer.AMGRead More »

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A young student falls into a hopeless romantic attraction to an invalid girl whom he can only see from afar.

Description: SINCERE HEART (1953, aka MAGOKORO) was Masaki Kobayashi’s second film as a director — but as with his first, YOUTH OF THE SON, it is something of a hybrid work, influenced heavily by his longtime mentor Keisuke Kinoshita, who wrote the screenplay. The resulting film is a deeply passionate and sentimental drama about a young student (Akira Inshihama) who falls into a hopeless romantic attraction to an invalid girl (Keiko Awaji) whom he can only see from afar.Read More »

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The star of this documentary is a quintessential Imamura heroine: a hard-nosed, ruthless survivor, with a sense of loyalty and an earthy sense of humor. In this movie, she sits in a Tokyo bar, which she used to own, and tells the story of the various means she used to survive, beginning with the day the atom bomb fell. It is a history of compromises and hard deeds, though there are few outright betrayals.Read More »

Continuing the Setouchi trilogy — which began with 1984’s MacArthur’s Children — this film looks at Japan just after World War II. The film opens with documentary footage of the 1995 Hanshin earthquake that flattened Kobe. The devastation reminds an elderly Keita Onda of the ruined landscape of Kobe just after the Allied bombing raids, which he witnessed from his home on nearby Awajishima Island. Cut to 1945, when Keita’s father, Kokichi (Kyozo Nagatsuka), receives the ashes of his eldest son who died on the battlefield. A rigid traditionalist, Kokichi decides to follow custom and return the ashes to his son’s birthplace in Kyushu. He hires out a car — a lavish expense that has the neighbors’ tongues wagging about a possible mass suicide. Instead, the family — consisting of the father, the mother Fuji (played by Shinoda’s wife, Shima Iwashita), Keita (Hideyuki Kasahara), daughter Hideko (Sayuri Kawachi), and teenaged son Koji (Jun Toba) — end up on a ferry bound for the south of Japan. Koji and his father are locked in a battle of wills. While dad preaches the value of tradition, Koji is much more interested in all things American. As the film progresses, Koji falls for a beautiful war-orphan named Yukiko (Hinano Yoshikawa). Also featured in this film are side stories about other passengers on the boat, including a sweet-talking black marketer who enlightens Kokichi on the joys of foreign liquor, a drug-addled soldier who falls in love with an impoverished woman about to turn tricks just to eat, and a dapper middle-aged man who jumps from the boat.Read More »

Aliens arrive on Earth and ask permission to be given a certain tract of land for their people to live on. But when they are discovered to be invaders, responsible for the giant robot that is destroying cities, the armed forces attempt to stop them with every weapon available. -imdbRead More »

A wry psychological comedy about a man who prefers his cat to his two wives. Some of the most famous Japanese players are the leads: the first wife is the legendary Isuzu Yamada (she was in over 300 movies between 1929 and 1956, had been married six times, and was still playing romantic roles); Kyôko Kagawa, usually a demure heroine, plays the unsympathetic second wife; Hisaya Morishige is the indolent cat-loving husband; the character actress Chieko Naniwa plays the mother. The story (by Junichirô Tanizaki) is set among shopkeepers at a small seaside town near Osaka, in the Kansai district. —Pauline KaelRead More »

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“The elegance and indisputable hard punch of Naruse’s storytelling become immediately clear the moment the lovers kiss and the director cuts, midclinch, to an almost identical shot of them kissing in the past, an edit that suggests this is a passion that transcends even time and space.”
– Manohla Dargis, New York Times (October 28, 2005)Read More »